iPhone’s Siri thinks a swamp is a good place to hide a murdered man’s body, trial reveals

A Florida man suspected of strangling his friend to death after a fight over a former lover was confronted by an unusual accuser — the iPhone’s digital assistant Siri.

CBS Miami reported that prosecutors on Tuesday showed a screen capture of Pedro Bravo’s iPhone that indicated Siri had been asked, “I need to hide my roommate.” To which Siri answered:

“What kind of place are you looking for?” Siri replied, providing as possible locations “swamps,” “reservoirs,” “metal foundries,” and “dumps.”

But Bravo’s attorney retorted that the image might not have been from the defendant’s phone. Shelby Webb, a reporter for the Herald Tribune, noted that Bravo’s phone was an iPhone 4. Siri was a feature of a later version of the iPhone, the 4S. And the man he allegedly killed was not his roommate.

Bravo is accused of killing 18-year-old Christian Aguilar, who was dating his ex-girlfriend Erika Friman, in September 2012.

Bravo admitted that the two had fought on the day Aguilar went missing. In a police interview shown to the jury at his trial, he confessed that he was “angry and stopped the car and said, ‘Fine, get out.'”

When Aguilar refused, Bravo said, “I was sitting here in the car, and I remember he said something and I just punched him across the face.” He insisted that he only struck Aguilar “once, just once,” before adding that he didn’t “want him to be found a skeleton by his parents and not be able to have a funeral.”

When the police asked him if his friend would be found alive, Bravo responded, “I pushed him out of the car, then I got out of the car then I kept punching him. I really hope he’s okay. When I left the scene it was me, I was just there whaling on him, then I kept going until I could see he was okay but he couldn’t move anymore. Then I drove away.”

Aguilar’s body was found a week later in a partially wooded area not far from where this alleged altercation took place. Detectives believe that Aguilar was poisoned, thrown in the trunk of Bravo’s sport utility vehicle, then strangled before being buried.

Watch a report on the trial via CBS Miami below.

[Correction: A report claimed that Pedro Bravo and Christian Aguilar were roommates. The same report stated that Bravo had asked Siri on his iPhone, “I need to hide my roommate.” Both claims are false.]

About the Author

Scott Eric Kaufman is the proprietor of the AV Club's Internet Film School and, in addition to Raw Story, also writes for Lawyers, Guns & Money. He earned a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of California, Irvine in 2008.